2025 Leadership Gathering: Rooted in Service, Rising to Lead

Jointly hosted by the Brushy Fork Leadership Institute and the Berea College Appalachian Fund, the 2025 Leadership Gathering is a regional event devoted to celebrating service-driven leadership, strengthening organizations, and empowering thriving communities across Central Appalachia.

Formerly known as the Leadership Summit, this annual gathering brings together leaders, practitioners, and community builders of all experience levels. Whether you’re an executive leader of a nonprofit or a grassroots volunteer just stepping into leadership, you’ll find opportunities to connect, grow, and lead with purpose.

Rooted in the values of service and collaboration, the Leadership Gathering features energizing sessions, interactive workshops, and meaningful networking opportunities. Together, we’ll foster powerful conversations, discover practical tools, and strengthen the collective impact of leadership in the region.

Come connect. Come learn. Come grow.

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Early-Bird Session

Finding Grant Opportunities with ChatGPT | Melissa Vermillion, Grant Ready KY

This hands-on session equips grant professionals with advanced strategies to streamline their prospect research using artificial intelligence, specifically ChatGPT. The focus will be on leveraging AI to uncover, evaluate, and prioritize grant opportunities—whether or not participants have access to subscription-based databases.

Attendees will discover how to craft precise AI prompts to generate curated lists of potential funders aligned with their missions. We'll explore how to direct ChatGPT to extract and summarize essential funder criteria, including information drawn from websites, IRS Form 990 filings, and publicly available databases.

Participants will learn a step-by-step process for refining prompts and iterating AI-driven searches to maximize relevance and accuracy. The training will also demonstrate how AI can help analyze grantmaker patterns and assess the relative competitiveness or return on investment of each opportunity.

The session includes a downloadable prompt toolkit for continued use after the training, enabling attendees to confidently integrate AI into their daily grantseeking workflow—whether working independently or as part of a development team.

**MUST ALSO PURCHASE GENERAL ADMISSION TO ATTEND. ORDERS WITH ONLY THE EARLY-BIRD ADD ON WILL BE CANCELLED.

Tracks & Presenters

This year's Gathering features a choice between participating in one of three eight-hour tracks or up to four concurrent one-hour workshop sessions.

Future-Ready Nonprofit Communications: Lessons from Leadership Tri-County | Dr. Jordyne Carmack

Small teams, tight budgets, big missions – sound familiar? Leadership Tri-County faced the same constraints until a human-first AI strategy rewired how they craft grant proposals, donor letters, board communication, press releases, curricula, and social media content. In this intensive track, Dr. Jordyne Carmack, Executive Director of Leadership Tri-County, talks you through the exact playbook that took LTC from “we’ll get to it someday” to “done by lunch.” Together, we’ll reverse-engineer use case studies from the past two years – including grant proposals, outcome reports, social content, media pitches, donor emails, and training modules – showing the prompts, tool stack (all low- or no-cost), and guardrails that kept the work ethical and mission-centered. Participants will: 1. Identify high-effort communication tasks by time cost and mission impact that could be improved with AI assistance. 2. Assemble a mini “brand toolkit” and use it to train an AI assistant so draft outputs align more closely with their organization and audience. 3. Apply a three-step guardrail checklist to improve AI-generated drafts to maintain audience trust and brand reputation.

21st Century Community Economic Development for Appalachian Communities | Peter Hille

All across Appalachia communities are coming back to life and in many places downtown storefronts are filling up with new, locally owned businesses. Young people are considering how they can build a future without having to leave, and those who left are being enticed to return as they see how their home community offers new opportunities and the quality of life they want. Decades of work by dozens of organizations and countless dedicated community leaders are bearing fruit as new restaurants, bookstores, coffee shops, and music venues are springing up in long-empty buildings. This track will explore the strategies and resources being utilized by local leaders and entrepreneurs to drive these changes and recreate their communities as places were people want to live. The track is inspired by examples from across the country and around the globe, and draws on insights from a wide range of experiences and mentors, from the earliest days of the Brushy Fork Institute through the current moment.

Cultivating Community Leadership through Practical Tools and Proven Strategies | Stacy Henderson, Jenny Totten, & Amanda Workman Scott

What does it take to turn a bold idea into a community-powered movement? This interactive track is built for leaders who are ready to move from brainstorming to building. Whether you’re launching a new initiative or strengthening an existing one, you’ll engage in hands-on activities like asset mapping, inclusive team building, and vision planning to chart a clear course forward. You’ll explore proven project design strategies, discover facilitation techniques, and practice storytelling strategies that shift local narratives and spark momentum. Through peer dialogue and coaching circles, you’ll ground your learning in lived experience and apply insights directly to your own community context. Participants will walk away with practical tools: editable planning templates, facilitation guides, and a draft action plan tailored to their home communities. Even more importantly, you’ll leave with a renewed sense of confidence and a strengthened regional network—connected to others who share your commitment to a thriving Appalachia. By the end of the session, attendees won’t just understand new models, they’ll be prepared to apply them. This session equips leaders not just to envision a better future, but to build it, together.

Find more detailed track descriptions and presenter information on Brushy Fork's website at: https://www.berea.edu/brushy-fork-institute/2025-leadership-gathering/sessions

Workshop Sessions

Block 1

• The Path to Servant Leadership | Tim Monroe, Tim Monroe Consulting LLC
• Coach, Don’t Carry: People Development Tools that Build Culture, Confidence, and Capacity | Susan Douglas, Girl Scouts of Kentucky's Wilderness Road
• Network Weaving & Cross-Sector Collaboration: Lessons Learned in Central Appalachia | Samantha Glaser, Teach for America Appalachia
• Brainstorm-a-thon: Solving Your Biggest Challenge | Annette Hines, KY Tenants
• TBA

Block 2

• Leveraging AI for Smarter Grant Prospecting with ChatGPT | Melissa Vermillion, Grant Ready KY
• People Ready Communities | Leah Van Winkle & Mike Hogg, Brushy Fork Leadership Institute
• Sharing the Magic: Storytelling for Leaders | Raymond Lauk, Eastern Kentucky University
• Synergy for Service: Unleashing Your Team's Impact Through Collaboration | Annette Hines, KY Tenants
• TBA

Block 3

• Creating Economic Development in a Forgotten Neighborhood | Rhondell Miller, Purposeful Missions Consulting
• Curing Misplaced Competition with Collective Impact | Amanda Page, Center for Peerless Cities
• Strategic Planning for Small and Medium Nonprofits | Kiana Mahjub, Berea Arts Council
• TBA
• TBA

Block 4

• Trauma Informed Leadership | Taryn Henning, Reluctantly Well
• From Idea to Impact: Accelerating Nonprofit Growth with AI-Powered Grant Writing | Natalie Axton, Appalachian Book Co
• Strategic Doing | Betsy Whaley, Mountain Association
• Appalachian Values | Chris Green, Loyal Jones Appalachian Center (Berea College)
• TBA